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Transforming mobility management with real-time visibility

by

Pallavi Vanacharla

Do you wish you could see how much mobile data your employees are consuming before the bill arrives? Well, you’re not alone. Most enterprises have no idea how much data is used – and what it will cost – until they get the staggering bill.

A few telecom expense management (TEM) tools have tried to solve this problem with things like tracker apps on mobile devices. But they fall short in many ways:

Data extracted from devices isn’t always accurate.

There’s no detail on costs because usage isn’t mapped to rate plans.

It requires lots of manual work to translate this type of usage information into actionable data.

For the first time, you can have complete visibility into employees mobile data usage – in real-time – not from an app on your device, but directly from your network service provider.

You can view data usage, and charges. The usage is based on how your service provider structures your pricing in your contract (e.g., separate rating for long distance, MMS, etc.). As soon as a minute of voice or data is used, the service provider rates it in real time in their billing engines.

In the past, you’d never see this information until you received your bill, but the Control Center for Mobile Enterprise platform provides this real-time visibility. You know exactly who’s using how much data and what it is costing you.

Instant control

The real power of 24/7 visibility is that it equips you to take immediate action to avoid unexpected charges and ensure predictable billing.

And more, all in real time. You can even have the platform take care of these changes automatically by creating business rules. Because you’re directly tapped into your network service provider’s system, the change happens instantly.

Previously, making a change to your services required multiple phone calls, emails, maybe even a third-party vendor to manage it for you. Worse, the service request might not take effect until the end of the billing cycle, and by that time you’ve already incurred steep overages and possibly even a billing dispute.

For example, suppose you have an employee traveling in China, with a roaming plan of 3MB of data, and she’s reaching the limit having used 2.9MB. As soon as she crosses the plan limit, within a half hour it could rack up thousands of dollars, say, if she were viewing videos. With the Control Center mobility management platform, you can receive an alert that she’s nearing a threshold and instantly upgrade her to the next level plan.

Having instant visibility into usage with a mobility platform also makes it easy to manage your pooled plans. You can see if your pool in reaching its data limit. If so, you can detect your heavy-duty data users and take immediate action, such as transition them to an individual plan, or simply add a data top-up feature.

Raising the bar

Managing mobile services and devices across an enterprise is inherently challenging, with so many moving parts and diverse needs. But it gets exponentially simpler when you’ve got a comprehensive, real-time view of what’s going on, and the power to take immediate action.

Remember when the Prius rocked the world with the backing-up camera view? Now it’s the standard for new cars. When we saw what was possible, our expectations shifted. Enterprise mobility management is about to undergo that same shift. Cisco Jasper raised the bar on mobility management with Control Center for Mobile Enterprise – and it will forever change how you manage your mobile workforce.